The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow (2003)

1) Kissing the Lipless; 2) Mine’s Not a High Horse; 3) So Says I; 4) Young Pilgrims; 5) Saint Simon; 6) Fighting in a Sack; 7) Pink Bullets; 8) Turn a Square; 9) Gone for Good; 10) Those to Come

Mercer's posse graduates into a proper band, but struggle with presenting anything that really sticks this time around. All very pleasant though.

Key tracks: "Mine's Not a High Horse", "So Says I", "Young Pilgrims"

Chutes Too Narrow falls in that awkward category of albums where I struggle to think of anything to actually criticize, and yet it still fails to click with me. The early/mid-00s indie sound so wonderfully represented by the album is close to my heart, it retains everything I enjoyed about Oh, Inverted World and appreciate The Shins for in general, and at various points during my lifetime I’ve called James Mercer a melodic genius (sometimes with hyperbole, sometimes dead seriously) and he's up to his usual tricks here too; but no matter how many boxes I check as I go down the list of things I like about the album, this is still the Shins album that’s remained the most distant for me. What am I supposed to make of that?

The Shins are a livelier bunch on this album than on Oh, Inverted World, having graduated from Mercer’s bedroom solo project-come-band into an actual group of sorts, and the more vibrant full band arrangements throughout the record reflect this. There’s fewer cosy acoustic bedroom strums and there's a lot more electric guitars and pep in the backbone: some parts even rock, or at least what passes as rock in The Shins’ world. The best parts of the songs are still Mercer’s vocal melodies which make his unintelligible word salad lyrics come to life as well as the quirky keyboard parts that are all over the record, both of which were also the best parts of Oh, Inverted World and just sound as great when they’re texturing more energetic tracks. Chutes Too Narrow isn’t a million miles away from the debut despite going more electric, but it’s a step towards the more characterised Shins sound that comes to mind when thinking about Mercer's merry bunch.

 

Still, this whole album somehow leaves me largely unaffected about it even if I do enjoy it in purely objective terms. I guess my main issue here is that there aren’t any real stone cold stand-out songs. “Mine’s Not a High Horse” is the closest the album has one, which in its chorus hits that special Mercer zone where the best parts of the album are distilled into one snappy section, the whimsical keyboard melody climbing around Mercer’s voice and the rollicking rhythm. “So Says I” is another standout but I’m honestly hard-pressed to say whether it’s because I genuinely think it’s a great song, or if it sticks simply because its manic pogoing and twee glam rock attitude distinguishes it so much from everything else around it; the whole album is a caffeine shot into the Shins formula and “So Says I” is its most hyper-awake part. Once the pretty acoustic debut throwback “Young Pilgrims” has had its turn, Chutes Too Narrow settles into a comfortable loop of pleasant and perky indie pop ditties that strum, jangle and frolic in a similar manner over and over again - the country twang of “Gone for Good” is about the only time the album pulls a new trick out of its hat - and it shortly comes to a close after the half hour mark. It all passes by a little too quickly and without stirring things too much: itt doesn’t outstay its welcome, and yet after it’s finished it doesn’t feel like it ever really made much of a visit in the first place. Chutes Too Narrow is a little too unassuming for its own good, and not enough of it really springs to life.

The Shins at their best are a genuine joy and at their worst Mercer throws out overwrought treacle and calls it a song, and Chutes Too Narrow falls so squarely in the dead right middle that it doesn’t tick the reaction off in either direction. It's an accomplished record, I'll give it that - I've been enjoying its presence in my rotation in the weeks preceding this review and so it's not like I can really say a bad word about it. But in the group's chronology it’s the phase between the intimacy of Oh, Inverted World and the full bloom of Wincing the Night Away, and both of those albums offer more distinguished (and distinguishable) takes on the ideas presented on Chutes Too Narrow. This is like a little appetiser to give you an idea of what you can expect from The Shins and to pique your interest towards the courses to follow, but you’ll forget it the moment the next dish comes along. 

Rating: 5/10

Lennie Moore - Outcast: Original Soundtrack (1999)

1) Prelude; 2) Daokas; 3) Soldier's Camp; 4) Heaven on Adelpha; 5) World of Marshes; 6) Fatally Wounded; 7) Main Theme; 8) The Ancient Forest World; 9) Watch Out!; 10) Let's Fight!; 11) World of Snow; 12) World of Temples; 13) Main Theme (Reprise); 14) Oriental Spirit; 15) World of Mountains; 16) Orchestra Rehearsal; 17) Ülukai Dance

Sweeping orchestral mountains and valleys, rousing vivid landscapes with extended compositions. A classic soundtrack for a classic game.

 

Key tracks: "Heaven on Adelpha", "World of Snow", "World of Temples"

Outcast is one of those cult classics that by some strange string of fate has ended up becoming something big and meaningful to little old me. It’s always one of the first no-brainer choices when I’m asked to list my all-time favourite games, and its relative obscurity has in some way made it feel even more like it’s something special to me personally. Its grand open-world design, character-driven story beats and epic scale was something very different from my usual video game habits when I encountered it by chance, and its very distinct personality best described as European made it feel incredibly different to anything else that tried to do the same afterwards but always felt they fell short. It’s probably the first game that genuinely drew an emotional reaction out of me when I completed it for the first time. In many ways, it revealed a new aspects to one of my favourite pastimes at the time, and that special magic still remains as I’ve replayed it countless times over the years.

What set Outcast apart from other games at the time is how it presented itself: not just in its graphics with the rather unique voxel-based looks, but in the overall scope of its design. It’s a weird game that dreamt big, and Appeal (the developers) treated it like a special prodigy that could achieve those dreams. A lot of effort and money went into making the game feel that you were in fact witnessing a grand cinematic adventure, and one of the aspects helping to drive that was the soundtrack composed by Lennie Moore and performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and Choir. By today’s standards this isn’t a big deal but an actual orchestrated game soundtrack was absolutely not a thing back in 1999. CD quality audio in games hadn't been around for all that long relatively speaking and so most games aiming for the same style of music went with MIDI strings, and games had only recently started to stretch their wings to the new sonic extents that the evolving technology allowed. This was one of the big promotional points around Outcast as well, with a blurb on the game box advertising it as one of the main features and the orchestra getting credited early on in the movie-like opening credits roll. 

 

 
The orchestral score of Outcast doesn't simply rely on having a big, big sound. The greatest thing about Moore's compositions is that the songs get to live and breathe, ebb and flow. Most of the songs on this soundtrack go for around five minutes, often longer, and not a minute is wasted and only rarely looped. Outcast's big worlds meant players would spend a long time in particular areas and so the songs have been constructed with that in mind, with the multi-minute compositions moving between different moods and variations on their key melodies across their length. Moore went to painstaking lengths to give the game a unified feel across its score while making sure all the various areas had their own flair, and his songs are miniature pieces of art on their own rather than simply backing music. They paint worlds with their movements, particularly the songs dedicated to the key regions of the game. Centerpiece songs such as the pastoral arcs of "World of Temples", the deep-seated melancholy of "World of Snow", the middle-eastern flourishes of the sprawling "Oriental Spirit" and the dramatic slow-builds of "World of Mountains" colour their respective areas with a gripping evocative touch, glueing your attention to the world around you from the moment you step foot into a new area with a new arrangement above it. 

I'm normally not a big fan of orchestral scores, and nine times out of ten they're the epitome of soundtracks that are there to exist and fill space rather than bring something special to the overall experience. The twist is that I think this soundtrack ruined all the others for me. This was the first orchestral game soundtrack I remember hearing and it's such a fantastic score that any other game walking in its footsteps felt like a complete letdown musically. It's still in my opinion among the best soundtracks of its kind, not just in games but across mediums e.g. films (where orchestral scores are, by default, more prominent but also usually even more throwaway). Moore took every advantage he could out of the chance to compose something with a large orchestra in tow and I'm not afraid to say that the results are emotionally stirring for me. Heck, "Heaven on Adelpha" in particular is a vividly beautiful song that can honestly get me a little misty-eyed if caught on a tender moment; it's high up among my favourite video game pieces. 

 

Everything about Outcast's music reflects the game in general so well: it's a labour of love, created by people who truly believed in their art and poured their everything into it to ensure that it was something unique and genuinely special. It's a remarkable soundtrack and among my favourites.

 

And if you're wondering what nicks off one point from the score of one of my favourite games of all time, it's the three combat music pieces where the soundtrack's general building blocks are a little ill-fitting and get stretched a bit too thin for their own good. The combat is probably the game's weakest part, and that applies for the music too.

Rating: 9/10

Kent - Då som nu för alltid (2016)

1) Andromeda; 2) Tennsoldater; 3) Vi är för alltid; 4) Den vänstra stranden; 5) Nattpojken & dagflickan (feat. Anna Ternheim); 6) Vi är inte längre där; 7) Förlåtelsen; 8) Skyll inte ifrån dig; 9) Gigi; 10) Falska profeter; 11) Den sista sången

Kent plan their funeral and finish on an album that doesn't dwell on the end, but rather focuses on delivering one last set of great songs.

Key tracks: "Vi är för alltid", "Falska profeter", "Den sista sången"
Bonus video: The trailer

In March 2016, Kent announced their funeral. The (fantastic) trailer for Då som nu för alltid featured a skeletal drummer marching through familiar iconography from the last three decades - mementos of album covers, music video scenes and logos across the career - and eventually leading a darkly foreboding parade through the deserted streets of Stockholm: the grim reaper visiting moments in history and gathering everyone together for one last time. If it wasn’t clear that something was up from the visuals alone, the stark 1990 ✞ 2016 message at the end of the video made it clear. Last album, last tour, quarter of a century coming to an end. Kent were going to their grave and they were going to celebrate it.

The announcement to call it a day was a shocker, given only two years earlier Kent had released Tigerdrottningen and had showed no signs of slowing down. Still, in retrospect, it's perhaps not coincidental that Tigerdrottningen was the unexpected harbinger of death. It had been the first album in Kent’s long history where it had felt like they were running out of steam, hiding its moments of brilliance underneath a consistent feeling of the once inspiring band operating on autopilot. It wouldn't be too farfetched to think that maybe the band themselves had realised something was amiss too; with Kent always having had a tight control over their journey, the relative non-event of Tigerdrottningen may as well have been a warning sign that the spark wasn’t there anymore. Rather than trying to correct the course, bowing out gracefully after all this time probably seemed like the right idea lest they risked of becoming a band way past their best-by date. 

If you view Då som nu för alltid in that light, it makes a lot more sense on surface level. Despite the theatrics surrounding it (including that hilarious album cover), the album itself is relatively low on the drama and if it is about the end, then it's really subtle about it. Much of the record deals with closure and legacy but mostly in a very specific, character study -like manner that doesn't particularly tie in with the band without a stretch. Instead, Då som nu för alltid sounds like the band is picking things up where they left them the last time like nothing had happened - it’s a direct sequel to Tigerdrottningen, utilising much of its soundworld and aesthetics like it’s just another addition to the back catalogue without any hidden agendas. It’s not exactly what you would expect from a funeral wake and it’s almost bafflingly unconcerned about all that, but on the other hand it’s not like it would make any sense for Kent to back away now from what their sound had evolved to by this point, and when’s the last time you heard an intentional career closing record that experiments or stretches into new directions? The effortless synthesis between electronic programming, synthesizers and a real live rock band was a perfect outfit for Kent and they knew where to go with it and when to emphasise one aspect over another, and Då som nu för alltid flexes that skillset. There aren't too many tweaks from the last album but the sound was never Tigerdrottningen's issue and you could almost say that this second go at it is like Kent wanting to prove they could do justice to the ideas presented on that album.

This isn't a big tearjerking goodbye album; what you mostly have here instead is a really solid, often great album that falls neatly in line with everything else Kent had been doing in the 2010s. The song material is generally top notch, with plenty of peaks and relatively few lows: “Den vänstra stranden” sounds like an excerpt from Tigerdrottningen’s less exciting depths, “Skyll inte ifrån dig" gets buried in the final barrage of songs. There's a duet again, and "Nattpojken & dagflickan" with Anna Ternheim is by a long shot the best duet in Kent's catalogue, smoothly moving close to power ballad territory without actually stepping in it, keeping an element of tension and energy while absorbing the dramatics. The key trait tying the tracks together is that everything sounds grandiose. Every song on Då som nu för alltid is meant to sound at least a little bit epic and something to stir the rumbling emotions within the listener even if they never actually talk about the end directly - each track is a a hand to firmly hold onto during the last journey you'll ever take together, ready to become a lifeline if needed. It's often hopeful and at its heaviest merely bittersweet, but always grand and evocative. When the explosive chorus drums of "Andromeda" colour the stars in the sky in a flash of fireworks and children's choirs, when the extended finale of "Falska profeter" reprises the music played in the album trailer and turns it into a communal huddle moment, when "Vi är inte längre där" grows more and more into a 80s-styled stadium synth showstopper ready to release the stage pyrotechnics with each passing chorus - they all feel larger than life and incredibly important and personal in the moment in time that they inhabit. Even if the album avoids the obvious emotional checkpoints, it still aims to be something resonant and warm with every step and for the most part it succeeds.

The title drop track "Vi är för alltid" is the perfect representation of what Då som nu för alltid aims for, and it serves not as just Kent's last classic single before the end but also as the album's early anchor point for its themes. It's an archetypical Kent pop song the likes of which they had been dropping across the past handful of albums, but it's one that learned lessons along the way and strives to aim higher. To put it simply, it's a banger, a hot badger, it slaps - it’s an alluring verse which grows into a magnificent chorus that sounds even more titanic after it rises from the ashes of the the brief breakdown. There are many others like it on Då som nu för alltid, songs where Kent deliver a hell of a good pop song as they rely on the instincts they had built over the past few, more direct albums - "Tennsoldater"'s electronic twitch and the hard-hitting take-no-prisoners energy of "Förlåtelsen" especially (that final run!) - but none of them feel so vital as "Vi är för alltid". I'm a fan of subtle lyric changes and a special shoutout goes to the shift between its choruses, breakdown and the last chorus that is pure genius in how it hits entirely new emotional reaches with just little tweaks, moving from hopeful ("they will sing songs / make films / write books about us") to defeated ("just kidding, no one is going to sing songs..."), until it eventually morphs into pure desperation ("please make films about us, you must sing songs about us..."), and it sounds so magnificently anthemic the further it trails towards its worries about being forgotten. It's a multifaceted triumph, and the perfect title track (even if indirectly).

But if there is a key song here, it's obviously going to be "Den sista sången" - literally "The Last Song". Like most of the album it slyly dances around the elephant in the room as it describes a transatlantic moment of two destinies moving apart, and it takes it all the way until the very end and the very last lyrics for the subtext to finally become text: "This is the last moment we see / This is the last song I give to you”. As it does, the music swells in that exact wistful, melancholy yet beautiful manner that is how in your heart you always wanted this journey to end. There's that cliché about not being sad that it's over but glad that it happened, and that exact emotional note is what "Den sista sången" nails down, carrying a blue haze throughout its calm guitar riff, the inexplicably English-language middle-eight where the children's choir and echoing drums from "Andromeda" make their longing return back to earth and the appropriately sizeable finale that stays just short of becoming the kind of an epic ending that the song felt like it was building up towards. And I'm not going to lie, I would have loved for it to have had the big waterworks credits roll that the occasion calls for and the abrupt end feels downright cheeky: the last wink from the band, stubbornly making their own way as they always have done and denying even the smallest bit of obvious fan service. But I've made my peace with it and if anything, the swift closure brings, well, closure. It doesn't linger on, this chapter has finished and life moves on. It hits a different kind of emotional beat. "Den sista sången" is brilliant, and the perfect song to end a career with.

And then it's over, the funeral march has finished, but Då som nu för alltid barely lets that little fact define it as an album. I still don't really know which way I swing here - the sentimental side of me would have loved an album that milked the hell out of everything coming to an end, but not doing so and largely presenting itself as just an album among others has in some ways let it build a life beyond that reputation. It's easier to pick it up for a listen and simply treat it as the great album it is without that extra emotional weight behind it. There was always going to be bias around this album by way of simply knowing it is the end and that the band deliberately considered it as such, but by letting these songs breathe outside that context ensures the listener hears them primarily on their musical merits, and it's a great album just on that basis alone. Not within Kent's top tier perhaps, but a steadily consistent example of their talents in songwriting, arrangement and performance. For their last album, Kent decided to simply showcase the reasons they endured for 26 years and with which they built a grand discography worth exploring, focusing on delivering one last set of excellent songs over dwelling on their own funeral. It results in an album that stands up to the old highlights, and it’s something they can proudly close their story with.

Rating: 8/10

Kent - Tigerdröttningen (2014)

1) Mirage; 2) Var är vi nu?; 3) Skogarna; 4) La belle epoque; 5) Svart snö; 6) Allt har sin tid; 7) Innan himlen fall ner; 8) Din enda vän; 9) Godhet; 10) Simmaren; 11) Den andra sidan

A potentially interesting album left cruising on autopilot.

Key tracks: "Mirage", "Skogarna", "La belle epoque" 

Kent went from a clear rock band to a hybrid of synth pop and rock all the way back in 2007 and you would reckon that by the time I would talk about their 2014 album, that change wouldn't be something that needs to be mentioned any longer. We get it, they changed sound, and nearly a decade after it happened it's now the norm for the band, no longer anything strange or bewildering. But Kent did keep tweaking that sound, exploring different frontiers that the change had cleared the pathway for, and so while there is a clear split of two halves in the band's discography, Kent had avoided repeating themselves after that halfway point. Even so, it is 2014's Tigerdrottningen where there’s a sense of Kent being plateaued. First hearing the album at its release, it was the first time my main takeaway from a new Kent album was that it sure sounds like a Kent album through and through: no surprises, no revelations, simply exactly what I expected to hear from them at this point and little more. And long story short, and review TL;DR, but that's still the primary take I have on Tigerdrottningen. It's where the comfortable corner the band had established for themselves had started to sound perhaps too tight.

Tigerdrottningen is so close to being a really fascinating album. It's a really charged record, sometimes even angry and even though the music is still predominantly bright, there's a sharper hit to its production that sounds urgent and determinedly pointed. Joakim Berg has clearly reached some kind of a boiling point and there's a heavier political lean to the album’s lyrics, often just as simple off-the-cuff lines absolutely laced with poison. It comes to surface on "La belle epoque", a near-formless rant about the state of modern Sweden and the hypocrisy among its citizens, and "Skogarna" which distills the hollow hopelessness of being stuck somewhere you have no affinity for in a political climate that ensures that hope never grows (and there's a fantastic self-referential line too about hearing your old hit song from the nearby radio, which is given the honour of the final twist of the knife in the gut). Many Kent albums have traded on melancholy, but Tigerdrottningen is fed up about it and sounds like it’s about to take action. But it can’t keep up what it hints at.

Tigerdrottningen's flaws aren't in how it does nothing new - and if we are honest, it does present some tweaks to Kent's standard formula, most clearly with the backing vocalists who follow and sometimes trade lines with Berg across the record, giving the band's traditional vocal harmonies their own distinct character. Rather, the problems lie in how absurdly frontloaded the album is and how badly it trails off afterwards, with the first four tracks offering a genuinely compelling vision of a record built on angry synth rhythms, which turns out to somehow lead into a disappointingly plain finale that bins Kent’s tradition to always finish on a grand high. The bulk of Tigerdrottningen is decently enjoyable but completely running on creative autopilot and it leaves little trace apart from the occasional obvious catch like the English-language movie sample that starts off "Din enda vän" is by far the song's most memorable part. Few sparks of light guide the way, i.e. the intensifying end of "Allt har sin tid" and the miniature line-trade drama of "Godhet" (both songs where the backing vocals shine), but for most parts Tigerdrottningen lacks in the areas Kent usually shines and doesn’t seem too bothered to try too hard to either. It's not so much unmemorable as it is just transparent: they’re songs you enjoy enough to keep listening to when they come up on shuffle, but there’s a reason why that’s the heaviest exposure they get. This is Kent running through the motions, channelling Kent The Brand rather than the band that would seek to innovate and reinvent with each new move, and the songs stick as much or as little as you'd expect in that regard.

But there is that initial quadruplet of tracks where Tigerdrottningen is on a mission you want to believe in. "Mirage" is a mirrorball that someone has smashed to pieces and now wields one of the shards as a blade; a disco giant that barely holds its bitterness in control, reinterpreting Kent in a way that much of the rest of the album tries to live up to and doesn't reach. "Var är vi nu?" goes for the stadium anthem antics of the previous album but creates a powerful lament out of it, properly introducing the album's backing vocalists and makes a strong business case for keeping them around (and Kent would). "Skogarna" and "La belle epoque" are, as mentioned, Tigerdrottningen's two most obviously angry songs and (perhaps not coincidentally) the record's two greatest moments, yet they interpret that intensity in such different ways. "Skogarna" is bubbling and bouncy, bearing the album's most chart-friendly chorus that's a beautifully pure euphoric rush of fluttering synths, hiding the song's true heart so effectively. Meanwhile "La belle epoque" throws it in the open. It puts Berg's voice right in the center, breathlessly running from one sarcastic and nihilistic line to another, resembling a spoken word poem that someone put over on a steady programmed beat and strings that sound like a mob forming a circle around you, only coming up for air for its brief, dramatic choruses. If Tigerdrottningen is Kent on autopilot, it's unbelievable how they managed to still come up with four songs this strong; and it's downright cruel for the listener they were put right in the beginning, one after another. 

A mid-tier, disappointing Kent album is still, overall, a good album - just not one that inspires. Despite its pointed lyrics Tigerdrottningen is ironically an album that has very little to say, from a musical perspective: rather than coming up with something novel it rephrases previous ideas instead, and the few new tricks it does employ are more window dressing than anything substantial. It leaves an impression of Kent either running out of ideas or finding themselves unable to build a whole album out of the ones they did have. For a band on their third decade and album count in double digits, it’s inevitable that a record like this happens and kudos to Kent for making it this far before it happened - but like so many of those records, even though it’s a decent album, even a fan knows deep down in their heart that it just isn’t anything special despite its moments of old brilliance flashing through.

Rating: 6/10

Kent - Jag är inte rädd för mörkret (2012)

1) 999; 2) Petroleum; 3) Isis & Bast: 4) Jag ser dig; 5) Tänd på; 6) Beredd på allt; 7) Ruta 1; 8) Färger på natten; 9) Låt dom komma; 10) Hänsyn

Kent fully embrace radio-friendly hit songs after years of avoiding them. Big songs for stadium audiences, though all cut from the same cloth.

Key tracks: "999", "Petroleum", "Jag ser dig"

As referenced in my other Kent reviews, and for the benefit of the non-Nordic audience out there, Kent were a big thing. They had the much-quoted reputation of being Sweden’s biggest band during their prime and their impact around the rest of the Nordic region wasn't too shabby either, and that success had come in completely organic terms. The band simply had the luck to make songs which resonated with people, that success provided them with the autonomy to take their career wherever they wanted, and people’s tastes just happened to follow along no matter the style or sound changes, even when Kent themselves liked to act hesitant about embracing their public status (minimal interviews, no traditional compilations, etc). They were a stadium band with stadium hits but it was completely accidental and prior to 2012, the band had been pushing themselves in directions that could have easily seen them get thrown back in the shadows. Jag är inte rädd för mörkret, then, is practically an acknowledgment of their status. It's an honest arena album with an accessibly melodic and hook-driven sound, it's outwardly positive and it dials down the murky electronic aesthetics of the preceding albums in favour of a booming, once again more band-centric sound. It's something you would normally imagine a band of Kent's stature sound like by this point in their career.

Joakim Berg might still be covering familiarly anxiety-driven Kent ground lyrically but the songs on Jag är inte rädd för mörkret hide their meanings behind their upbeat summer radio hit direction. 2010's En plats i solen was already hinting at this and in a lot of ways Jag är inte rädd för mörkret is a decided extension of those initial steps, with the same producer Stefan Boman in tow as well: everything sounds clear as crystal and bright like a holiday afternoon. As a fan of all those dark and insular records before this, my natural instinct should probably be to balk at this - but my simple brain is wont to find pleasure in big anthemic choruses just as much as anyone else's, and the fact is that Kent is simply really good at those. The songs on Jag är inte rädd för mörkret do not showcase anything new or unique, and they tiptoe in a kind of Absolute Radio territory to a perhaps dangerous degree, but songs such as "Jag ser dig", "Tänd på", Färger på natten" and "Låt dom komma" are a positive rush, precisely because they aim straight for the jugular. There is strength to a hecking good chorus and Kent are so proud of the ones on Jag är inte rädd för mörkret that many of the songs conclude with an extended repetition of their big central hook, simple and short enough to sing along even if you're not native to the language. They're the type of choruses that you get a little obsessed about as they continue playing in your head: in particular the uninhibited U2-stadium bombast of "Jag ser dig" (the best of this lot in its shameless fist-pump/sing-along theatrics) and the nearly camp and endlessly crowd-pleasing "Låt dom komma" are tracks that shine in this department, quickly pushing away everything that isn’t their chorus. But they are, absolutely, really great choruses.

 

Really, my complaint here isn't the direction itself because there's so many good and positively instant cuts across Jag är inte rädd för mörkret, but rather that it sticks so strongly to its one chosen element that after a while it all gets rather one note: by halfway point you know exactly where each song is going, because outside minor variation they all share the same structure and flow. It isn't until all the way to the very end that you get something a little different, when the somewhat abruptly moody, loop-driven closer "Hänsyn" ironically sticks out a bit too much, as a washed out rendition of the style the prior albums rode on. As good as the songs are, much of the album's material feels interchangeable with one another, and only a few songs really make a stand on their own merits. That notion is heightened further by how Jag är inte rädd för mörkret sticks its best - and most diverse - songs right in the beginning. "999" is a radio-friendly version of Du & jag döden's landmark finale "Mannen i den vita hatten": across its seven minutes of epic rock bombast and Berg's stream-of-consciousness style introspective ranting, it flips the usual Kent formula of ending an album with a slowly unfolding giant by starting with one and kicking straight into full speed. It's by and far the most "traditional" Kent has sounded in ages, but by way of an old master showing off why he became a legend in the first place. "Petroleum" leans towards the other extreme and more heavily against Kent's more contemporary electronic sound, but it twists it to sound brighter than before, like a dangerously sharp synth pop club hit. It's the most alluring song across the entire record, sinking deeper into its swirl of a chorus and enchantingly detached delivery, somewhat challenging the album's openly warm nature by taking its aesthetics and still moving inwards.

Perhaps the surprise here is that my reaction to the album isn't stronger. Jag är inte rädd för mörkret has such a strong personality and it's such a 180 degree turn from where Kent had been trawling since the mid-2000s that, like similar more audience-friendly endeavours in other artists' catalogues, it would be an obvious candidate for being an album you'd either love or leave behind. That it ends up somewhere in the middle - as a good album that’s neither too exciting or disappointing - can be attributed to its small flaws: how most of it is effectively multiple variations on the same song, and how in a tight 10-song run a few substandard songs ("Hänsyn", the indifferent slog of "Isis & Bast") stand out more than the consistently enjoyable bulk of the record. Part an olive branch to the wider audiences and part letting one’s hair down after a string of heavily conceptual, tightly-knit records, Jag är inte rädd för mörkret is a more interesting album by its nature than perhaps by its songs - my review for this album is shorter than my average Kent review simply because there’s less in these songs to talk about due to their very design. But its charm is in simple pleasures: the beauty of big pop songs delivered by a band who confidently know their way around them.

Rating: 7/10

Kent - En plats i solen (2010)

1) Glasäpplen; 2) Ismael; 3) Skisser för sommaren; 4) Ärlighet respekt kärlek; 5) Varje gång du möter min blick; 6) Ensam lång väg hem; 7) Team Building; 8) Gamla Ullevi; 9) Minimalen; 10) Passagerare

No plan or greater concept, just a casually put together set of ten songs with bright sounds. 

Key tracks: "Skisser för sommaren", "Ärlighet respekt kärlek", "Gamla Ullevi"

En plats i solen was released roughly seven months after Röd, with nary a warning or an accompanying fanfare. One day you just had two new songs available online with an announcement that an album would arrive in a week's time, and that's it. Behind the scenes, Kent had been feeling particularly inspired and the band thought to strike while the iron's hot rather than hold off until a full new album cycle, and the intention was to get the new songs they had been writing out while they were still new to the band as well - the album was reportedly finished the very month it was announced to the public. After a series of heavily thematic, cohesively put together records En plats i solen was an intentional break from such affairs - a holiday per the name (“A Place in the Sun”) - by way of simply knocking out some songs together and releasing them out in the wild.

With quick successor albums like En plats i solen you often find yourself viewing them as the b-sides collections for the preceding albums, and there is some truth to that here too as some of the songs were leftovers from the Röd sessions (though I'd be hard pressed to say which, with "Minimalen" being my most obvious guess). That said, viewed in retrospect, En plats i solen is far better described as the first glimpse of Kent's next phase. The electronic soundscape of Röd was here to stay but following its tour, a live band dynamic had started to creep back into the fray to act as the undercurrent pulling the synthesizer textures together and, perhaps coincidentally, the suave gloom around the last few albums had started to move to the side. Next year's follow-up album Jag är inte rädd för mörkret would be the conclusion to the change Kent was undertaking as it would engorge itself in bright and optimistic songs rich in melody, and En plats i solen leans a lot more towards that end goal than it does in Röd's direction, though it's still in the middle of pulling its other foot slowly away from its direct predecessor's shadow. It's a snapshot of the route Kent took from the darkness of Röd towards the sunlight of what was to come. 

The ten songs on En plats i solen are unrelated and without a greater concept or plan, and they are more extroverted and openly audience-friendly than Kent had been for a long while, going some way to bridge the gap between the popular rock hits of their past with the guidelines the band was operating on in the present day. They understandable carry lesser stakes, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. All the songs are forced to live on their own merits and for Kent that means going all-in on the hook department, which is extremely entertaining. Their strong melody game had never gone on hold but since Du & jag döden the band had began to treat albums as singular entities where all parts supported one another - now it's each song for itself, and that means Kent let them all explode as big as they can. But, the quick writing and recording process also means that some of the quality control from the previous album runs has loosened up and for the first time in recent memory, there’s a clear gap between the album at its strongest and and weakest, now without a stronger context to perhaps give the slightly lesser songs some non-musical meaning. And there's a number of them. "Varje gång du möter min blick" buries a great chorus with largely meandering verses, “Ensam lång väg hem” has some nifty sonic details but its repetition-heavy build doesn’t work as interestingly as it could, the bouncy synth pop cut “Ismael” used to be a favourite of mine but now sounds like the first draft of future Kent songs in its vein (I still like it - just that I like its successors more) and most damningly, I’ve owned this record since release and I still can’t remember how “Team Building” sounds off the top of my head. If you were to disparage this album as way to cash out on some quick outtakes and leftovers, there’s definitely material here to base that assumption on.

There is a night and day difference though between the more middling moments and the rest. The common thread throughout the album of Kent tackling more hit-oriented material, as if as a way to make up for the more esoteric singles of the previous albums and to throw some good ol’ crowd pleasers out, unexpectedly results in uniformly great songs. The synth fireworks and whistle hooks of "Gamla Ullevi" find Kent interpreting 2010s EDM choruses in their own language, the album stand-out “Skisser för sommaren” makes a crowd-begging la-la-la chorus sound fresh and euphoric (a special mention goes how wonderfully the song picks itself back up after its freak-out breakdown, right back into that undefeatable chorus),  the mournful and steadfast "Ärlighet respekt kärlek" shows just how great the band are at stadium-sized torchsong ballads when they're in the mood for one, and “Glasäpplen” utilises disco strings and beats over its emotionally detached delivery with such suave and charm as if it invented them. The album-focused orientation of the past few albums was one of the reasons they make up Kent’s golden period, but it’s actually refreshing to hear the band knock out a number of songs that are effortlessly, refreshingly open and welcoming - in part because they are so excellent at it. It’s the same strength that Vapen & ammunition held with its singles-or-bust approach, but this time the band are less self-aware about it which makes it, in some way, a little more honest and warm.

As far as the rest go, it’s enjoyable standard-tier Kent. The skittering electro of “Minimalen” nods towards Röd the most and it's a welcome change of pace towards the end of the album, and towards the weary prettiness and powerful duet vocals of “Passagerare” which closes the record with a yearning sigh. The album has a slight lean towards being frontloaded but it finishes cosily and comfortably, even if a little unspectacularly. And as it ends, no moment of reflection of what you’ve just listened to ever comes to pass, or any real lingering notion for that matter. I feel bad for saying this - because I do really like En plats i solen - but it’s an album I sometimes forget about, as it's sandwiched between two bigger personalities to the point that its appearance in the chronology is often accompanied by an “oh, that’s right” level of realising it’s there. En plats i solen is - for better or worse - a set of ten songs by Kent, some great and some less so, written and captured on tape as the band was coming off their creative imperial phase. After a discography of albums where each record has had a purpose to play in the story, En plats i solen feels slightly underwhelming as an album that "just" exists. A good album, as I’ve said - but one that is primarily a palate cleanser rather than a notable independent entry.

Rating: 7/10

Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf (2002)

1) You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire; 2) No One Knows; 3) First It Giveth; 4) Song for the Dead; 5) The Sky Is Fallin'; 6) Six Shooter; 7) Hangin' Tree; 8) Go with the Flow; 9) Gonna Leave You; 10) Do It Again; 11) God Is in the Radio; 12) Another Love Song; 13) Song for the Deaf; 14) Mosquito Song; Bonus track: 15) Everybody's Gonna Be Happy

Brutish, muscular and with a wicked sense of fun. It may be the only QOTSA album I really like but they sure hit the nail on the head with it.

Key tracks: “First It Giveth”, “Gonna Leave You”, “God Is in the Radio”

Bands with revolving memberships can be like slot machines: sometimes the line-up changes result in jackpots, and Songs for the Deaf is the 777 for Josh Homme's band of merry musicians. No other Queens of the Stone Age album has managed to hold my attention, yet here everything locks into place. Homme as the reliable core constant; Nick Oliveri as the chaos that lends the album a manic energy; Mark Lanegan’s gravely murmurs are the perfect fit for the record's desert-dry road trip; and perhaps most importantly, Dave Grohl presents the best case for why he belongs behind the drums rather than in front of Foo Fighters. I like the songs on Songs for the Deaf too, but remove or replace any of the core set of performers that bring those songs to life, and I don’t think they would work anywhere near as well. There’s a magical chemistry between the four main QOTSA squad members on this album, which makes Songs of the Deaf the muscular, brutish and entertainingly thrilling record that it is. 

 

It's fun, too, and perhaps most of all. Songs for the Deaf sounds angry and aggressive with its heavy riffs and Grohl's thunder god drums - in my teen years this was one of my go-to grr mrr teen angst albums - but it's as playful with that harder edge as it is genuinely inclined to make a lot of noise. Songs for the Deaf presents itself as a very archetypical Guitar Rock Album by an archetypical Guitar Rock Band and there are parts of the record that are practically overwrought with generic bad-ass masculinity (the constant car thematics, the over the top capital-R Rock radio DJs, the edgelord sperm logo in the liner notes), and while it would be wrong to say that the album subverts any of that, it has fun with it. "No One Knows", "Gonna Leave You", "Another Love Song", heck even "Go With the Flow" could all have been whimsical pop songs in another life, such is their breeziness and jovial nature - which the band then push cover in their grit and muscle and splice them with a hint of something more sinister to spice things up. The edition I have features a cover of The Kinks' "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy" as a bonus track at the end, where the flower power rock-along gets the same sonical treatment as everything else on the record; that mixture is honestly much more indicative of the whole album than you'd think from a random bonus cover, and to some extent it makes it obvious what gear the band were actually operating on when coming up with the album.

Nonetheless, the best thing that Homme and his companions do across Songs for the Deaf is rock out loud and hard. “No One Knows” is the hit everyone knows but I can't say I've ever been too enamoured by it and I’d easily rank it as among the album’s weaker cuts, with that bare-bones stomp beat it mostly operates on largely cruising past what actually makes the album great. Compare it to e.g. its counterpart singles, the full-adrenaline highway cruising “Go With the Flow” and the twisting and swirling stadium anthem “First It Giveth” and you can tell what their more famous sibling lacks as they abundantly conjure a storm of energy and noise, in particular how Homme (and the countless guest guitarists across the album) makes his guitar scream and growl while Grohl operates on some unholy zeal behind the drum kit. The extended showmanship pieces - “Song for the Dead”, “Song for the Deaf” and “God Is in the Radio” - primarily exist to serve that musicianship, dedicating large sections of their running length to the jam-like interplay between musicians who have tuned onto the same mental channel and really tap into that mythical rock and roll magic that wimpy indie dweebs like me most of the time just don’t get to indulge in. 

 

But above all, this is the album of immensely rewarding deep cuts where the album’s love for solid hooks gets to run the most unrestrained. “The Sky Is Fallin’” and “Hangin’ Tree” swirl with the darker undercurrents of the most isolate parts of the desert the driver of the album’s thematic cycle drives through, and they marry that aesthetic with some of hte album's most understated yet bewitching chorus hooks. The whole final stretch from “Go with the Flow” to “Another Love Song” is fierce pogoing fun, where big guitar textures meet bigger hooks and the impish smirk of the first half of the album moves to a wide open grin: for a rock album, this is incredibly backloaded and many of its best parts lie in its deepest areas. Though, it's not like the first half has anything to be embarrassed about and in particular “You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar…” is the perfect opener for what Songs for the Deaf turns out to be, as it literally sucker punches the album into the groove it stays on for its duration.

 

Following Songs for the Deaf Grohl returned to his own projects and Oliveri was kicked out of the band due to abuse allegations, and the Queens subsequently lost their spark. Or at least, that's what it felt like: the follow-up album Lullabies to Paralyze was an altogether murkier affair and while it gained critical favour from the fans, the casually interested me lost track. Songs for the Deaf became a curio in a record shelf, a one-off moment of attraction from a band who transforms with each release to the delight and disgruntlement of their fans. But even for the general consensus, Songs for the Deaf has found its place as an album clearly indicative of that imperial moment when a group of musicians go all-in with the intention of creating their magnum opus, and that ambition is rewarded as soon as the gas pedal goes down in the album's intro. It'd be easy to call this dumb rock fun - it's sort of how I treat it as these days whenever I'm in the mood for it - but it's so much smarter than it lets on in how it builds its songs and lays its hooks, and those brains guiding the guitar-heavy brawn of the record is what makes it work so well. Turn the volume up, kick back and enjoy the ride.

True story: I went to a religious summer camp when I was a teenager as kids my age in my country back in the day did out of habit/peer pressure from our parents. One of the girls in my school class who I had spoken about music before also attended, and she borrowed me this album for a listen during the camp. It does amuse me how the most tangible memory I hold from that camp is that exchange and how this Christian excursion lead me to discover this album of all things.

Rating: 8/10

Peter McConnell - Grim Fandango: Original Game Soundtrack (1998)

1) Casino Calavera; 2) Swanky Maximino; 3) Smooth Hector; 4) Mr. Frustration Man; 5) Hector Steps Out; 6) Hi-Tone Fandango; 7) She Sailed Away; 8) High Roller; 9) Domino's in Charge; 10) Trouble with Carla; 11) Blue Casket Bop; 12) Manny's Office; 13) Rubacava; 14) Blue Hector; 15) This Elevator Is Slow; 16) Domino; 17) Don Copal; 18) Neon Ledge; 19) Nuevo Marrow; 20) Gambling Glottis; 21) Raoul Appears; 22) Scrimshaw; 23) Talking Limbo; 24) Coaxing Meche; 25) Lost Souls' Alliance; 26) Los Angelitos; 27) The Enlightened Florist; 28) Temple Gate; 29) Ninth Heaven; 30) Companeros; 31) Manny & Meche; 32) Bone Wagon

Like it says on the cover: big band, bebop and bones. But what if I don't like big band and bebop...

Key tracks: "Hi-Tone Fandango", "Lost Souls' Alliance", "Ninth Heaven"

My great musical crime which forever bars me from entering the cool kids club is that I don't like jazz. It's a genre I have literally zero emotional resonance with, unless it gets particularly bad at which point it becomes one of the few tangents in the wide world of music as an art form that I genuinely dislike; free jazz is something I can earnestly say I hate, and I very rarely use that word with music. This is a weight I've carried on my shoulders for decades and I don't see this changing, unless I end up with some kind of major head injury that rewires me from the ground up. Sorry, not sorry. The Grim Fandango soundtrack is as close to a jazz album as I'll probably ever come to own. The Rate Your Music genre listing for the album specifically breaks its influences down to bebop, smooth jazz, Latin jazz and big band among a few others - I couldn't really tell where one ends and another begins, but presumably it's somewhere within this diaspora where my brain finds some kind of an acceptable threshold. Or perhaps it's simply the bias shining, because this is the soundtrack one of my favourite greatest games of all time and that kind of association can pull a hefty weight.

Click-and-point adventure games were one of the first genres I remember falling in love with when I first encountered the medium of video games - I didn’t even understand English when I started playing them, but I was so enchanted by how they played in contrast to the platformer games I mostly associated with games at that point, that I played them with a dictionary by my side or meticulously determining what the words meant through context: I self-taught myself English long before school and I can genuinely attribute a good deal of my bilingualism to those games. Grim Fandango, released in 1998, is often cited as the last great hoorah for the genre, before it fell out of favour in the mainstream and its torch was passed down to the hands of European niche enthusiasts. If it were to be considered a swan song, then it is a spectacular closing act. Its setting is truly unique in gaming, it’s seasoned thoroughly with incredible writing and acting that lends it full of emotion (be it genuine laughs or actual gravitas) and the core gameplay - centered around your typical adventure game puzzles - are thoroughly entertaining and avoids many of the quirks the genre was criticsed for. Many games boast to be cinematic but this is always in reference to epic set pieces and fancy on-rails sections: Grim Fandango is like an incredible miniseries where the characters and the writing pull you in for a binge watch you’ll never forget. From the perspective of someone who grew up with the genre and who loves it dearly, Grim Fandango is absolutely one of its greatest peaks.

Grim Fandango’s world is a mishmash of 1930s art deco and the Mexican Day of the Dead, and so its soundtrack is also a meeting of two worlds. The lounge-y jazz vibes that have already been mentioned interact with Mexican folk music as the game moves from its swanky high roller locales towards the more folk-loric heart of the Mexican underworld, and the soundtrack does a splendid job fleshing out these incredibly contrasting surroundings. The jazz elements of the score are for large parts relatively restrained thanks to their purpose in describing the tone of the setting through sound, which prevents them from going off rails, and despite my genre allergy there are a number of songs here that I do appreciate because of their role in the game. “Hi-Tone Fandango” in particular is an iconic video game song for me, and though it may not sound much to anyone who hasn’t played the game, it’s a song that so vividly brings the listener back to its appointed locale if you have had the chance to wander the world with it tracing your steps. I can't say I'm too enamoured by most of the music here on its own, without the context, but I can enjoy it to the extent that it gives the world a faint hope that maybe my taste can be saved one day.

 
The special parts of the Grim Fandango score for me are the ones that lean heavier towards the Latin and Mexican influences. Peter McConnell's music is incredibly atmospheric throughout and while the jazz parts work with the film noir tension and high style aesthetics of Grim Fandango's world at its swankiest, the music that's more in line with the folklore heart of the game and feature the score's most beautiful and most atmospheric cuts.  The wistful optimism of “Ninth Heaven” is absolutely lovely and practically acts as the game's theme for me, and "Lost Souls' Alliance" actually benefits from being taken away from its context. It has a very slow pace and build and the area it plays in is normally heavy with dialogue, so hearing it on its own really helps appreciate just what a delightfully crafted thing it is. There are a few other genre hops scattered throughout that are delightful in their own ways, such as the psychedelic surf rock of "Bone Wagon" as well as the hilariously sadsack "Talking Limbo" which is almost kind of touching in its own special heartbroken sailor way.

If there is a principal reason as to why I don’t find myself tuning onto the Grim Fandango soundtrack as much as I might expect to given my reverence for the game, it’s not actually because of its genres of choice. Game music by its nature often behaves in loops, and I’m not a fan of when soundtracks squeeze the songs in by limiting the loops they go through; and so my largest complaint about the Grim Fandango OST is how most of its 32 songs are gone in 1-2 minutes. Many of these songs would be good enough to have warranted a few runs through their central loop, to let the songs and the melodies linger around for a while for a greater impact; some of them are great to the point that limiting them to a quick 1-minute round feels practically unfair and like you're being robbed out of the full portion. There are obviously also songs within that extensive that don’t stand out as much, sometimes intentionally, but when those songs are the same length as the more essential tracks you specifically listen to this soundtrack for, it ends up highlighting the less engaging sentiment of the former while at the same time failing to give justice to the latter.

Which leads to the central dilemma. In the recent months I’ve been reviewing a number of video game soundtracks and I find them to be a challenging balancing act full of pitfalls. By default I dislike the notion to treat soundtracks differently to any other music - you have a reasonable argument in how the context of playing the game bears such a heavy impact when considering the music, but as music listeners we imprint our own contexts to so many "normal" albums that it feels like a moot point. But it’s soundtracks like Grim Fandango’s that throw me off my own high horse. I appreciate the music because of the reverence I hold for the game, but it feels practically impossible to reconcile that with how so much of this music I would probably turn off if not for those memories they evoke, and how even the great moments can sometimes pass by like they’re nothing of interest purely because the way they have been edited and presented in this collection. That’s an aspect that’s unique to soundtracks and it breaks my logic, and I've spent the days I've sketched out this review considering how much I actually enjoy this soundtrack. So I take a coward's way out and rate it somewhere in the middle of the spectrum: it's music that evokes a lot in me, but it's one of the soundtracks in my collection I probably listen to the least.

Rating: 6/10

Kent - Röd (2009)

1) 18:29-4; 2) Taxmannen; 3) Krossa allt; 4) Hjärta; 5) Sjukhus; 6) Vals för Satan (Din vän pessimisten); 7) Idioter; 8) Svarta linjer; 9) Ensamheten; 10) Töntarna; 11) Det finns inga ord

Kent redefine themselves by boldly pushing deeper towards a more electronic sound, with a record that's a deep and awe-inspiring journey.

Key tracks: "Vals för Satan (Din vän pessimisten)", "Svarta linjer", "Töntarna"

Kent were frustratingly quiet in media (even the Swedish Wikipedia articles for their works are miniscule, despite how huge they were in their own country) so there's rarely any contextual information available to gain a further understanding on how each album came to be. There is however a particular interview from 2009 which confirms a couple of points behind the process for Röd. One is that Kent were getting increasingly fascinated with the idea of merging a rock band with an electronic act to the point where you couldn't see the seams: 2007's Tillbaka till samtiden had been the first taste of this direction and now the band were hungry for more and eager to take it further. The other tidbit is that during the recording of the album the band actively wanted to ignore their past, not just their own discography but by also refusing to listen to any old favourites that had historically inspired them - the only music they personally consumed during the sessions was music that was being created in the present day by brand new artists. Kent wanted to create a version of themselves who were completely in the moment, free of any prior baggage.

Röd is Kent's moment of epiphany. Tillbaka till samtiden had started out as just another reactionary move in a series of albums defined by such, but its more electronic sound had resonated with the band more than they or anyone anticipated. Everything clicked and Kent found themselves at the start of a whole new path, and so they went all in on it. Röd was recorded in Berlin's Hansa studio which has become synonymous with artists seeking to reinvent themselves in particularly modern ways, and Röd bears all the hallmarks of a so-called "Berlin album": dense production, highly modern or even futuristic soundscapes, the artist diving deep into a new direction in a quest to reconfigure their music. It's somewhat ironic that when seeking nothing but modernity the band ended up seeking inspiration in a place where many others have sought out the exact same as they did, but the magic worked once more. After a lifetime of constant change, Kent finally figured themselves out.

Whether it's because of the ghosts of Hansa or the more battle-minded confidence brought on by the decision to really drill into the electronic soundscapes, Röd acts like it has everything to prove and it has come prepared for it. It's an album in the very sense of the word: a tightly written and cohesively built journey where all the peaks and valleys form a clear narrative, where songs flow carefully into one another and where every twist and turn is meticulously planned. There's even a bonafide intro - Kent's first and only - and its commoner church choir is a beguiling start, leading cunningly into the synth scatter and aggressive disco beat of "Taxmannen". Röd has been designed from the ground up to be a powerful whole, but not at the expense of songs. There are no weaker tracks that only work as the bridges between the heftier cuts, but rather each song is meant to be an individual Moment that continues the the emotional and musical heights of what came immediately before. Each song is a a standout that avoids obvious or conventional pathways towards their climax point, throwing curveballs and revealing new facets of themselves. Each track feels important. 

None perhaps more than "Vals för Satan (Din vän pessimisten)". When Kent held the album's launch party and livestreamed the concert, "Vals för Satan" served as the opener and the introduction to the world of Röd despite being the album's literal centerpiece - but it was nothing if not appropriate, because it's the sound of Kent's present and future distilled. It's where the strains of rock and electronic sound embrace most intimately in the way the Kent dreamed, where the deep synthesizer layers combine with the muscle of a band playing in the same room, unfurling into an intricate and exhilirating colossus of a song. It's a phenomenal song that threatens to become gigantic - and for a brief moment becomes so as its second chorus explodes - but which deconstructs and folds into itself in burning tension at the verge of becoming a stadium anthem. That tension, subtly shifting through its synth loops and a steady rhythmic backbone before it can't hide anymore, is its heart and hearing it beat was and still is a something that sends shivers.

Its strengths are emblematic of Röd as a whole. Röd rivals Du & jag döden as Kent's absolute peak and it's so interesting because of how different these two albums are sonically: one drenched in empassioned guitars and the other navigating through cold synthesizers. But both are connected through how determined they are, finding Kent at a time and place where they felt they needed to define themselves as they steered their sound into very specific places. Both are also incredibly emotional albums that climb to incredible heights, but for Röd that emotion is pure and cold ambition and the climaxes are result of a "Vals för Satan" -like tension bubbling until it pours over with vindication and vitality. Röd is the kind of album that you perhaps don't lose yourself in emotionally like you may have done for Du & jag döden, but rather it reveals something surprising and equally awe-striking at every given opportunity. What just happened, how did that just happen, where the hell is it going to go next - and even when you know the answers, Röd still overwhelms by its denseness and, quite frankly, its audacity.

I have a lot of love for the first half of Röd - "Taxmannen" and "Krossa allt" are an inseparable dynamite duo that sets the tone and velocity of the record impressively, "Hjärta" swells and thunders in its heartrending orchestral-adjacent anguish and "Sjukhus" patiently speeds towards its free-fall of an ending in an enviably confident manner. But because the album's flow is a carefully thought out narrative, its first chapters are essentially just the slow introduction of Kent's new style of play and a tease for what's to come. After "Vals för Satan" reveals the hand in full, the rest of Röd keeps laying on the trump cards. "Idioter" and "Svarta linjer" are the closest to classic Kent rock songs the record has to offer but translated into the new language; "Svarta linjer" would have been massive in any form it would have received thanks to its fantastic call-and-answer hook that goes on for the entire song and its stunning launch into its full form, but here it sounds practically pristine as the heavy production lifts for a moment and gives the song the space it needs to spread it wings. And if the flight of "Svarta linjer" is majestic and controlled, the hectic rave cascade that "Ensamheten" breaks down into is a mad dash all over the place, raising a whirlwind. 

"Töntarna" was released as the lead single for Röd and it served as a very strong statement of intent- now in full context, in its place hidden away towards the end, it sounds perhaps even weirder than it did all on its own. It's a crooked and twisted pop song, ultimately revolving around a big chorus with some serious groove to it and featuring a series of snappy hooks (that added percussion melody in the second verse is so simple it's kind of ingenius), but it's been turned so inward and shying away from any light that it's barely recognisable as such. The rigid and mechanical rhythms, the distorted textures draping the background and Berg's multi-tracked and processed vocals lend it an air of uneasiness and even when it starts letting its hair down towards the end, the extended finale is more akin to deliriously falling down through a rabbit hole than any kind of sweet release. It's a fascinating song and there's nothing else like it in Kent's catalogue: tucked away as track ten of its parent album, it sees Röd bringing out its demons before they're done away with, the dark undercurrents of the record manifested into a singular weird-ass song.  

That makes "Det finns inga ord" the actual exorcism of those demons. I've always viewed the song in parallel to the closer for Tillbaka till samtiden, "Ensammast i Sverige" - they inhabit the same slot in the tracklist and are the longest songs on their respective records, they're both driven by a striking drum loop and they both offer a moment of reflection and peace after the swerves of what came before. The key difference is that where "Ensammast in Sverige" kept its cool throughout its length, "Det finns inga ord" gathers the courage to blossom. It's the most conventionally beautiful song across the entire Röd, with no tension or overwhelming denseness to speak of: it simply blooms from a petite melody into a declaration of love the size of the universe. At the end of such a dizzying album, it offers the serenity to guide the listener to take in everything they have just heard, while covering the dark sky with the most beautiful colours in such a vast scope. It's the most "normal" thing on the entire album but it's at the exact right spot where that makes all the difference, and it ends Röd with grace.

In my review for Du & jag döden - Kent's other all-time classic record - I acknowledged it as the record where Kent perfected what they as a band stand for: in tone, in emotion, in resonance. Röd does that again, but more concretely in terms of sound. If Tillbaka till samtiden had left a more ambiguous cliffhanger impression of whether Kent would go electronic again afterwards, Röd clarified that intent. It did it so strongly in fact that from here on in Kent would be a mix of rock band dynamics and tightly programmed backing tracks until their very end, sometimes emphasising one end over the other but always very clearly using the same model. Kent were a band that spent a lot of their first decade of albums constantly shifting shape either by evolving or shedding skin, and Röd finally fixed them in their place. That shouldn't be seen as a slight against Röd because, well, I don't blame them - this particular sound does fit Kent absolutely perfectly no matter how much I love their guitar heydays, and Röd itself is an incredibly impactful album. It's a phoenix at the moment of its rebirth, bursting in glorious flames and showcasing its new self with pride and confidence: it's Kent creating a singular piece of work that accurately reflects how seismic and important its creation felt for the band. Röd is Kent finding that glimmer of perfection once more, with a truly rewarding, deep record.

Rating: 9/10

Kent - Box 1991 - 2008 (2008)

CD1: Kent (1995) + Bonus tracks: 12) Döda dagar; 13) Håll i mig (Jones och Giftet); 14) Ögon (Jones och giftet); 15) Klocka (Havsänglar); 16) Cirkel (Havsänglar)
CD2: Verkligen (1996) + Bonus tracks: 11) Saker man ser (Demo); 12) Alpha (Demo); 13) Din skugga (Demo)

CD3: Isola (1997) + Bonus tracks: 12) OWC (Live); 13) Celsius (Live)
CD4: Hagnesta Hill (1999) + Bonus tracks: 14) Inhale/Exhale (Demo)

CD5/6: B-Sidor 95-00 (2000)
CD7: Vapen & ammunition (2002) + Bonus tracks: 11) Vintervila; 12) Lämnar; 13) VinterNoll2; 14) Socker (Demo); 15) Love Undone (Demo)

CD8: Du & jag döden (2005) + Bonus tracks: 12) M; 13) Välgärninger & illdad; 14) Nihilisten; 15) Alla mot alla

CD9: The hjärta & smärta EP (2005) + Bonus tracks: 6) Nålens öga 

CD10: Tillbaka till samtiden (2007) + Bonus tracks: 12) Min värld; 13) Tick tack; 14) Det kanske kommer en förändring; 15) Ingenting (Demo); 16) Håll dit huvudt högt (Live Eskilstuna 2008)

A great career (so far) retrospective box set for a great band, with enough treats for the fans too.

Key tracks: Of the bonus material, "Håll i mig", "Nålens öga", "Det kanske kommer en förändring"

Following the closure of one chapter and the start of a new one in their career, Kent continued to avoid releasing any kind of a standard greatest hits package, and instead celebrated the milestone with a box set collecting together the first decade and a half of their career: the evolution from scrappy angst-rock wannabes to stadium-sized hit makers and stylistic chameleons stubbornly doing exactly what their instincts told. I managed to score this suspiciously cheap in nearly brand new condition, and I still consider that as one of the best music deals I’ve come across when it comes to getting your money’s worth.

Part of the box set experience is the physical wonder, and the Kent box ticks this pretty well. The overall design is minimalistally sleek and stylish rather than lavish and glamorous: the ten CDs are stored a sleek, compact box within a slipcase, and the discs have their own slipcases that feature minor re-designs of the original cover art to create a shared aesthetic within the box. It's not a box set that may not particularly wow in presentation, but it looks and feels just right for the band and their general restraint. The obligatory companion booklet is pleasantly thick and informative: you’ll need to brush up on your Swedish to read through the band’s chronological and often irreverent take on their own career path as each era gets a quick behind-the-scenes glance, and given Kent aren't exactly reknown for talking to the press, the information here is fan gold. Together with other interesting trivia e.g. setlist samples across the band's history, it's a solid retrospective and a great backdrop for what matters the most, i.e. the music.

I've reviewed the albums separately and you can find the links to the individual reviews in the tracklist so there’s little point in repeating myself - the gist is, by 2008 Kent had become a great band who had been responsible of plenty of great albums and classic songs, with a few wobbles along the way  Thus, from a fan perspective the main hook here will be the bonus material, and it's much better than some of the tracklist initially might read as. The b-sides for the first four albums were already collected in B-Sidor 95-00 which is included here anyway, and so the first half’s somewhat scarce bonus material mainly focuses on demos and live cuts - but don't let that think they're not something worthwhile. The big snag are the handful of recordings from Kent’s early incarnations Jones och Giftet and Havsänglar, and they are shockingly good - the recording quality is shoddy but the early 90s alternative/indie sound is great and as songs they are more interesting from an arrangement and melodic perspective than most of the 1995 debut album. It's actually weird how the band almost regressed from their initial versions when they started recording their proper debut album (based on these carefully selected excerpts), and if the debut had more songs like "Håll i mig" I'd be singing a different tune about it. 

 

 

The other demos have been selected carefully to show aspects that haven’t been heard in public before, and they aren't just scruffy versions of familiar songs as one might expect. A handful of Isola era songs look to have been originally conceived much earlier and so the demo for "Saker man ser" sounds far more intimate when featuring just Joakim Berg and his drum machine, and the demo for “Din skugga” has none of the studio version's guitar walls and instead has an (synth-)orchestral backing that echoes the 2009 single "Hjärta". The later demos follow suite, with "Socker" being similarly intimate to "Saker man ser" but now with an entire section of lyrics that were scrapped from the final version (we finally a get title drop!) and "Ingenting" driving in the style change as even the home demo goes all in on the electronic flourishes. The rest of the bonus material for the first four albums revolves around the band’s ill-advised attempt at cracking the English market: the live recordings of "OWC" and "Celsius" are the English versions of the songs, and you also have demos for the previously unreleased “Inhale/Exhale” and later on “Love Undone” (an English version of Vapen & ammunition’s “Duett”). The new songs recorded for the English version of Hagnesta Hill haven’t been included (one of the box set’s very few exclusions), but the English material that is presented proves really strongly how much Berg struggles with singing in English with his practically incomprehensible enunciation, and I genuinely do not think we are missing anything from hearing less of it. If anyone ever wishes Kent would sing in English so they could understand it, just point them to these songs as a counter-point.

Nonetheless, the albums from Vapen & ammunition onwards get inarguably more rewarding with the bonus material as the box set acts as a chance to compile all the b-sides and non-album singles from these periods together. There are some great songs among those: all four of the Du & jag döden b-sides are practically essential to any fan of the album as they retain both the sound and the quality of the record, and the beautifully deep and atmospheric "Det kanske kommer en förändring" is a stunningly good scene-setter, lush in rich keyboards that coat Berg's voice in distant dreaminess. The non-album singles, the Rock Band favourite "VinterNoll2" with its urgent guitar energy and the wistfully ethereal "Nålens öga", would have been real album highlights had they ever appeared on any, and this is the only release outside the actual singles where you can find them. There's also one brand new song in form of a live version of "Håll dit huvudt högt", which was never recorded in studio and so this is the only time it ever appears in Kent's discography. Given how Kent-by-numbers it is that's no real surprise and making it one of the box set's selling points feels rather rough, but it's still a thoroughly enjoyable song: a dictionary example of a song that introduces literally nothing new to the band who wrote it (some of the melodies are so familiar I had to check they weren't circulated to other songs), but the familiar ingredients create an enjoyable, if a very safe, tune.

The long and short of this is that if you're still stuck in the CD era, Box 1991 - 2008 is a great way to get hold of a little over the first half of Kent's back catalogue (if you're even able to easily find this anymore). If you're a big enough fan to consider getting the box even if you own everything already, then the bonus material is worth it for the latter day b-sides alone, alongside the genuinely interesting demos. Kent have always done their utmost best to avoid cheap retrospectives (even the compilation that did arrive after they called it a day is so irrational that it feels like intentionally flipping the bird), and the box set reflects that well, with clear care to attention in place and not just chucking any old recordings as blatant fan grabs to listen to once and forget immediately. I don't think my average rating for the albums will quite match the rating for this box, but that extra boost is for the full package and the value it has. It acts like a real history tour, told in music - and so, I give my eternal kudos to whoever priced this at around €30 within months from release at my then-local record shop.

Rating: 9/10